Beauty and Astrophysics

Beauty and Astrophysics

Spectacular colour images have been made by combining CCD images in three different passbands using Adobe Photoshop. These beautiful images highlight a variety of astrophysical phenomena and should be a valuable resource for science education and public awareness of science. The wide field images were obtained at the Siding Spring Observatory (SSO) by mounting a Hasselblad or Nikkor telephoto l...

Astrophysics.

Using the oscillation frequencies of α Cen A recently discovered by Bouchy & Carrier (2001, 2002), the available astrometric, photometric and spectroscopic data, we tried to improve the calibration of the visual binary system α Cen. With the revisited masses of Pour-baix et al. (2002) we do not succeed to obtain a solution satisfying all the seismic observational constraints. Relaxing the const...

Astrophysics.

Engagement with beauty: appreciating natural, artistic, and moral beauty.

The Engagement With Beauty Scale (EBS), designed from the aesthetics of I. Kant (1790/1987), G. W. F. Hegel (ca. 1835/1993), and T. Aquinas (ca. 1260/1947) and the psychological work of J. Haidt (J. Haidt & D. Keltner, 2004), measures engagement with natural, artistic, and moral beauty. In Studies 1 and 2, the authors describe scale construction, exploratory factor analysis, confirmatory factor...

Asymmetry, Symmetry and Beauty

Asymmetry and symmetry coexist in natural and human processes. The vital role of symmetry in art has been well demonstrated. This article highlights the complementary role of asymmetry. Further we show that the interaction of asymmetric action (recursion) and symmetric opposition (sinusoidal waves) are instrumental in generating creative features (relatively low entropy, temporal complexity, no...